Over the next week I went about my daily routine at Mepkin as usual, but inside I was deeply troubled. I was obsessed with Brother John. On one hand he represented everything I had ever longed for, and on the other all that I had ever feared. I’d read Christian mystics say that God is both terrible and fascinating, and for me Brother John became both.
Of course, this had nothing to do with the fact that he was a monk and I was not. On the contrary, Brother John was fascinating precisely because I intuited that to live as he did, to have his quiet peace and effortless love, had nothing to do with being a monk and was available to us all.
But Brother John was also terrible because he was a living breathing witness to my own inadequacies. Like Alkibiades in Plato’s Symposium, speaking of the effect Socrates had on him, I had only to picture Brother John under his umbrella to feel as if “life is not worth living the way I live it.” I was terrified that if I ever did decide to follow the example of Brother John, I would either fail completely or at best be faced with a life of unremitting effort without Brother John’s obvious compensations. I imagined dedicating my life to others, to self-transcendence, without ever finding that inner spark of eternity that so obviously made Brother John’s life the easiest and most natural life I had ever known. Perhaps his peace and effortless love was not available to all but only to some. Perhaps I just didn’t have what it takes.
Finally, I asked Father Christian if he could spare a few minutes. Father Christian is Mepkin’s feisty, 88 year-old former abbot, and my irreplaceable spiritual director. Slight and lean, his head is shaven and he wears a bushy chest length beard which he never cuts. When I commented that his beard didn’t seem to be getting any longer, he regretfully said that his beard had stopped growing and added, “While in the popular mind the final length of my beard depends on my longevity, in actuality it depends on my genetics.” Fluent in French and Latin and passable in Greek, he acquired PhDs in Philosophy, Theology, and Canon Law as a Franciscan before entering Mepkin. His learning, his direct yet gentle manner, and his obvious personal spirituality make him an exceptional spiritual director. And while he grouses once in a while about the bottomless demand for this direction I’ve never known him to turn anyone away.
I told Father Christian of my experience with Brother John, and I told him that it had left me in an unsettled state. I wanted to elaborate, but he interrupted me. “So you noticed did you? Amazing how many people take something like that for granted in life. John’s a saint you know.”
Then seeming to ignore my predicament he launched into a story about a Presbyterian minister having a crisis of faith and leaving the ministry. The man was a friend of his, and Christian took his crisis so seriously that he actually left the monastery and traveled to his house in order to do what he could. The two men spent countless hours in fruitless theological debate. Finally dropping his voice Christian looked the man steadily in the face and said, “Bob, is everything in your life alright?” The minister said everything was fine. But the minister’s wife called Christian a few days later. She had overheard Christian’s question and her husband’s answer, and she told Father Christian that the minister was having an affair and was leaving her as well as his ministry.
Christian fairly spat with disgust, “I was wasting my time. Bob’s problem was that he couldn’t take the contradiction between his preaching and his living. So God gets the boot. Remember this; all philosophical problems are at heart moral problems. It all comes down to how you intend to live your life.”
We sat silently for a few minutes while Christian cooled off. Maybe he finally took pity on the guy or maybe it was something he saw in my face, but when he spoke the anger in his clear blue eyes had been replaced by a gentle compassion. “You know, you can call it Original Sin, you can call it any darn thing you want to for that matter, but deep down inside every one of us knows something’s twisted. Acknowledging that fact, refusing to run away from it, and deciding to deal with it is the beginning of the only authentic life there is. All evil begins with a lie. The biggest evil comes from the biggest lies, and the biggest lies are the ones we tell ourselves. And we lie to ourselves because we’re afraid to take ourselves on.”
Getting up from his chair, he went to a file cabinet in the corner of his office and took out a folded piece of paper. Turning, he handed it to me and said, “I know how you feel. You’re wondering if you have what it takes. Well, God and you both have some work to do, but I’ll say this for you, you’re doing your best to look things square in the face.”
As he walked out the door I opened the paper he had given me. There, neatly typed by his ancient manual typewriter on plain white paper, was my name in all caps followed by these words from Pascal.
“You would not seek Me if you had not already found Me, and you would not have found Me if I had not first found you.”
